First author paper for Xiongtao Ruan published in ISMB Proceedings

Xiongtao Ruan, a Computational Biology Ph.D. student, had his first first-author paper published this week in the ISMB Proceedings issue of Bioinformatics. The paper describes the first work on identifying putative causal, spatial relationships from fluorescent microscope images, and is the result of a collaboration between the Murphy group and the Wülfing group at the University of Bristol. ISMB is one of the leading conferences in the field.

The work is based on previous analysis of the dynamics of T cell signaling described in a paper in Science Signaling on which Xiongtao was one of three first authors. That paper described the construction of 3D spatiotemporal maps of signaling dynamics from confocal microscopy movies of GFP-tagged T cells. These maps were the basis for the causal graph modeling in the ISMB paper.

The work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, and the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.